Today's vehicle information displays such as dashboards, display composed graphical information provided by various sources such as vehicle information system, advanced driver assistance systems, navigation systems and consumer entertainment systems. Such composed graphical information includes textual, iconic, pictorial and/or figurative information and comprises both safety relevant graphical information and non-safety relevant graphical information.
Safety relevant graphical information comprises for instance vehicle speed and/or indications relating to state and warning information of the vehicle engine and vehicle components and/or state and warning information of one or more advanced driver assistance systems such as blind spot warnings and distance warnings just to mention a non-limiting selection thereof for the sake of explanation. Non-safety relevant graphical information comprises for instance information generated by entertainment and navigation systems.
Functional safety is a primary issue when displaying safety relevant information to a user controlling an apparatus, to which the safety relevant information relates and the control of which requires an adequate reaction of the user in response to the safety relevant information.
Safety relevant or safety related information represents information, an erroneous content of which might be directly responsible for death, injury or occupational illness, or the erroneous content of which may be the basis for decisions relied on, which might cause death, injury, other significant harms or other significant actions. Safety relevant or safety related information may be the output of safety critical application typically operated in a safety critical environment, which is one in which a computer software activity (process, functions, etc.) whose errors, such as inadvertent or unauthorized occurrences, failure to occur when required, erroneous values, or undetected hardware failures can result in a potential hazard, or loss of predictability of system outcome.
Image data, on the basis of which the composed graphical information is generated, is transmitted over high-speed connections from various sources to one or more image processing units and further to the displays showing images composed of the image data received from the various sources. Parallel interfaces represent an economic solution to transfer image data between the separate components.